Software Lead Weekly

This Week's Favorite

Reading this post was the first time I really understood the deep foundations required to shift your organization toward functional structure. The risk in this transition is enormous, so there is so much to learn from Ben Thompson and the way he analyzes Microsoft recent reorganization. Highly recommended!

Culture

Andrew Shafer with a thought-provoking ideas on culture, incentives and building a learning organization. His message is clear - we're building organizations around titles and culture buzzwords, instead of educating our people to learn to ask the right questions: "you are either building a learning organization, or you will be losing to someone who is."

Adii with a short post that I enjoyed about the power of one "extra" investment. Can you think of a small gesture to show your gratitude to your teammates for their hard work? Can you do the same for yourself? (you deserve it!)

Noah Kagan (of AppSumo) with some great Out of Office replies you can use to have fun with your teammates on your next OOO. Personally, I liked best "Thank you for your message, which has been added to a queuing system. You are currently in 352nd place and can expect to receive a reply in approximately 19 weeks."

Peopleware

This post can be used as a great reference for ongoing handling of Technical Debt. Henrik Kniberg offers a simple way to measure your satisfaction of your code quality and how to improve it over time. Eliminating Technical Debt should be part of your planning (e.g. part of writing features, or as tasks in the sprint/backlog). My advice is to pay attention as you don't want to invest time in eliminating Technical Debt in features/systems that are not useful for the business. It will always be cheaper and more beneficial to cut out some features and reduce your code-base. Share it with your technical leads and have a discussion about your current satisfaction with your code, and the approach you should use for handling quality in the long run.

Greg Brockman shares 6 lessons learned from hiring at Stripe, a company with probably one of the best engineering team in the world. My favorites are "Only hire people who make others want to be around them" and "Everyone gets a veto". Having these guidelines for hiring can help you check candidates for culture fit.

What a great post by Edmond Lau (ex-Quora Engineer). If there is only one thing I could take from it, I'd choose "Focus on the overarching mission of the project, team, or organization, and why it's critical to that mission to meet the launch date". It is nearly impossible to enforce a commitment. Build relationships with them now, to allow such openness in the future. Invest the time, share your thoughts, help them succeed. It would pay off when you'll need their help.